During my stay in Oaxaca I finally had the chance to meet Ron Mader, founder of the award winning website Planeta and contributing editor for Ecotourism and Latin America of Transition Abroad.

Ron has been living in Oaxaca for the past 6 years, and amongst his many activities he is now actively helping the artisans and tourism operators in town to give a new and fresh start to their businesses, which have been seriously affected by the lack of tourism of the past year, following the social uprising in town.

Through Oaxaca Options – a series of discussions, lectures and small fairs organized by Planeta – he is encouraging tourism operators and local artisans to share their experience for the development of eco, rural, and cultural tourism in town. He is also offering free seminars on the use of the Internet as an effective marketing tool to increase business opportunities and sales.

I was very surprised to see Oaxaca so empty. I had definitely underestimated the negative impact of the social and political crisis and of the consequent travel warning issued by the US government in November 2006 on tourism. Two months ago a ‘milder warning’ recommending caution while travelling to Oaxaca was extended by both the US and Canadian authorities.
I thought maybe in Europe we did not have full press coverage on the situation, hence my naïve attitude, but now that I have been in the city for a few days I can not see any reasons why visitors should not come to Oaxaca.

I was glad to hear from Ron that the negative situation has also generated many ‘reaction projects’, from associations of accommodation providers and language schools to other private initiatives which show the deep love the people of Oaxaca have for their city.

The crisis is now over and its negative impact on the local business is something that has been discussed in too many details. What we like to do now is to focus on the recovery process in all its positive aspects: we love to see local artisans showing their work on Flickr, and Mexican artist Francisco Verástegui drawing a delightful map of the historic trees of Oaxaca. These centenary trees are still there, regenerating their hometown with new oxygen, and ready to offer their shadow to million of tourists!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under ecotourism, mexican culture, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.